Witness - Davis Vanguard

Publisher: David Greenwald | Managing Editor: Benjamin Frandsen

Production Manager: Eric Hudson | Public Relations: Elisa Plata

Democratizing free speech by centering the anonymized and uncensored testimony of justice-impacted citizen witnesses of the carceral state, enabling the autonomous stakeholder curation of an accurate historical record of mass incarceration.

The incarcerated content creators and carceral literacy activists Ghostwrite Mike and The Mundo Press, the co-creators of the trauma-informed Barz Behind Bars (B3) Creative Writing Spoken Word Performing Arts Workshop @barzbehindbars_ deployed at eleven adult prisons in California, are each recipients of the 2024 Vanguard Carceral Journalism Guild Fellowship. As VCJG fellows, Ghost and Mundo jointly produce from confinement the carceral news column Witness for the Los Angeles Vanguard’s Social Justice Bureau housed at UCLA, and are the producers of Inner Views, a virtual interview format that engages with artists, authors, academics, historians, and thought leaders to examine the intersection of the arts, culture, media, academia, politics, generational trauma, and the exercise of state power through the lens of equity and justice in order to deliver stimulating and uncensored conversations to the nation’s carceral state residents for their digital consumption via handheld tablet devices. Check out our collaboration announcement here.

The Mundo Press is the Carceral Mentor Coordinator for the nonprofit Ben Free Project. Read and follow his work h ere. You can reach him at mundo@benfreeproject.org.

Ghostwrite Mike is the Carceral Program Developer for the nonprofit Ben Free Project, and he serves on the Board of Directors of the nonprofit Radical Reversal. Read and follow his work here. Listen to his appearance on the Everyday Injustice podcast here. You can reach him at ghostwrite@benfreeproject.org.

Advisory board

The nonprofit Ben Free Project’s Vanguard Carceral Journalism Guild community of incarcerated newsmakers is advised by a diverse consortium of scholars, independent journalists, educators, and justice-impacted human rights activists committed to the democratization of speech, the universality of press freedoms, and the normalization of carceral state resident civic engagement.

Elizabeth Hinton

Elizabeth Hinton is a Professor of History and African American Studies at Yale University and a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She is the Co-Director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, and the author of America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960’s (2021), and From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (2016). Her popular writings, book reviews, commentaries, and scholarly works are widely published across an array of academic and law review journals.

Jonathon Simon

Jonathan Simon is the Lance Robbins Professor of Criminal Justice Law and Faculty Affiliate at the Center for the Study of Law & Society at UC Berkeley, School of Law. He is the author of Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America (2014); Governing Through Crime: How The War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (2007); and Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass (1993). His book reviews, commentaries, and scholarly works are widely published across an array of academic and law review journals.

Bruce Western

Bruce Western is the Bryce Professor of Sociology and Social Justice and the Director of the Justice Lab at Columbia University. He previously served as the Director of the Program in Inequality and Social Policy at Harvard University and is the author of Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison (2018); Punishment and Inequality in America (2006); and Between Class & Market: Postwar Unionization in the Capitalist Democracies (1999). His book reviews, commentaries, and scholarly works are widely published across an array of academic and law review journals.

Heather Ann Thompson

Heather Ann Thompson is the Frank W. Thompson Collegiate Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood In The Water: The Attica Prison Uprising And Its Legacy (2016), and Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (2001). Her popular writings, book reviews, commentaries, and scholarly works are widely published across an array of academic and law review journals.

Doran Larson

Doran Larson is the Edward North Professor of Literature at Hamilton College and the founder of the American Prison Writing Archive at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Inside Knowledge: Incarcerated People on the Failures of the American Prison (2023), and the editor of Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America (2013). His popular writings, essays, and scholarly works are widely published across an array of academic journals.

Moira Marquis

Moira Marquis is co-founder and Director of both the Saxaphaw Prison Books Program and Prison Banned Books Week; co-editor of Books Through Bars: Stories from the Prison Books Movement (University of Georgia Press); and lead author of the PEN America report on carceral censorship, “Reading Between the Bars.” Her popular writing can be found in Literary Hub, TIME magazine, The Progressive, The Hill, and Slate among others. Her academic writing can be found in Resilience, Green Letters, Science Fiction Studies, and the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to American Literature among others. She teaches at Fordham University.

Randall Horton

Randall Horton is a Professor of English at the University of New Haven and the co-founder of Radical Reversal, a carceral arts nonprofit funded by the Mellon Foundation. He is the co-editor of the American Library Association’s revised Standards for Library Services for the Incarcerated or Detained, and the author of Dead Weight (2022), the 2021 American Book Award-winning work #280-128 (2020), the GLCA Creative Nonfiction New Writers Award-winning work Hook: A Memoir (2015), and The Definition of Place (2006). He is a member of the performance collective Heroes Are Gang Leaders, which received the 2018 American Book Award in Oral Literature, and his essays and commentaries appear in Salon, MSNBC, and a wide array of podcasts.

Joan Parkin

Joan Parkin is a Lecturer of English Language and Literature at Boston University’s Prison Education Program, the Director of the Vanguard Incarcerated Press, and co-founder and former Director of Feather River College’s Incarcerated Student Program, where she is a Professor Emerita. She is the author of Perspectives from the Cell House: An Anthology of Prisoner Writings, and was the coordinating advocate for members of the Death Row Ten, a group of tortured and wrongfully convicted death row prisoners in Chicago, Illinois, many of whom became pardoned by Governor George Ryan, which led to several subsequent death sentence commutations.

Nathanial Dahman

Nathaniel Dahman is a Lecturer of Music Technology at CSU Stanislaus and teaches Music History at Valley State Prison via Merced College’s Rising Scholars prison education program. Using his multi-discipline media composition expertise, he coordinates the collaborative community volunteer action work effort of CSU student cohorts who are aligned in delivering creative arts-based outside-in video and audio editing services to the Ben Free Project’s Inner Views video lecture series and audio podcast programming. In coordination with Radical Reversal, he is committed to curating and proctoring the nation’s first fully accredited audio podcast and radio sound design training program incubator that prepares confined content makers for the retail production demands of radio podcast programming and confers upon graduates thereof transferrable college credit.

Charlotte West

Charlotte West was a freelance journalist covering higher education issues for more than fifteen years before becoming the editor of College Inside in 2021 and focusing her national reporting on the intersection of the criminal justice and higher education systems. As the only national journalist covering higher education in prisons, she is a unique combination of publisher, editor, and collaborator who empowers stakeholders to craft their own copy, publishes their testimonies, and distributes that public-facing work back into the carceral state for residents to access digitally on-demand.

TaSin Sabir

TaSin Sabir is the Communications Manager for Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, the Editor In Chief of the All Of Us Or None newspaper, and has served as the contracted graphics designer for LSPC’s special projects, reports, marketing materials, and website development needs since 2016. An Oakland, California native, she graduated from California College of Arts and Crafts with a BFA degree in Fine Arts Photography, founded the OakPod community space, has exhibited her art nationally, and is a regular contributor to the San Francisco Bay View Newspaper and YO! Youth Outlook. Via her editor role at AOUON, she features the work of incarcerated writers and artists while collaborating with returning citizen staff journalists and community activists to center their lived experience and restore the civil rights of justice-impacted citizens.

Alissa M. Moore

Alissa M. Moore is the Northern California Re-Entry Coordinator for Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, a journalist for the All Of Us Or None newspaper, the founder of Life Unlocked, and a returning Native citizen who was sentenced to life in prison as a seventeen-year-old youth offender and survived more than 25 years of carceral state confinement. Having provided expert witness testimony more than forty-five times in support of numerous Senate and Assembly bills in California, her legislative advocacy has been instrumental in shaping proposed policy revisions to SB 132, amending the best practices of the DOJ’s CRIPA investigative format, and passing laws that impact marginalized populations, including AB 1810, SB 1254, and SB 1139. Her post-carceral work with the WHO’s Warm Hand Off Program, Nourish California, Ahimsa Collective/MARJ Program, Greenlife/Earth Island Institute, Kaleidoscope, and Life Support/BPH advocacy reflects her passionate commitment to the pursuit of equity and justice for society’s most vulnerable populations.

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